Abstract

Plasmonic devices hold great promise for applications in the enhancement, manipulation and of light from quantum sources such as Er3+ ions, NV centres in nanodiamonds or quantum dots. Here we discuss recent work into the design and fabrication several such plasmonic devices.

Dark plasmonic modes have a greatly reduced radiative decay channel, leading to longer plasmon lifetimes. It should be possible to couple such modes to a judiciously placed quantum system, leading to enhanced emission from the quantum source. Here we discuss the design of structures that will support dark modes, and methods for exciting such modes.

Recently, research into optical analogues of some common RF antenna designs has been carried out. The antenna designs include the J-Pole family which could prove useful for directing energy from a quantum source to a receiver, with added polarization selectivity and vice-versa.

The recent demonstration of resistless nano-imprint lithography (RNIL, [1]) as a scalable technique for the fabrication of nanoscale structures in metallic films provides great promise for the mass production of plasmonic devices. Computational and experimental studies indicate that nanocavities in a metallic film produced by RNIL are very robust to the angle of incident light, support a higher energy localized surface plasmon mode than a similarly sized aperture, and exhibit strong absorption over a narrow bandwidth [2]. Applications for these nanocavities include plasmonic color filters, enhanced solar energy harvesting and the production of novel polarization states [3]. Here we demonstrate enhanced fluorescence of CdSe/CdS/ZnS core-shell quantum dots (QDs) via coupling to plasmonic nanocavities imprinted using RNIL into a silver film.

BIO

Jasper is in the second year of his PhD. He is supervised by Professors Ann Roberts and Paul Mulvaney. His work is focused on investigating and developing scalable nano optical elements for use in future remote sensing and telecommunication technologies. He is visiting Purdue from the 25th to the 30th of August from The University of Melbourne, Australia.